What business are you in? If you ar...

What business are you in? If you are like in the greatest degree family physicians, you will probably say that you are in the healing business, the curing disease business, or maybe the keeping race well business. Another way to examine at our profession is that we are in the information management business. We gather information when we interview a patient and order tests; we integrate those data with our personal knowledge base, what we know about the patient's family and community, information from consultants, and answers to clinical questions; and we communicate a treatment plan back to the patient, the chart, and our colleagues. This come of information is critical to the delivery of quality patient care, further most of us lack an organized framework for managing the torrent of medical information that we action every day in practice. The outcome is increasing frustration, a affect that we are not able to withhold up to date, and the possibility that we may not be giving our patients the greatest in number current evidence-based care.

American Family Physician (AFP) contributing editor Allen Shaughnessy, Pharm.D., and colleague David Slawson, MD have identified several ways that we navigate the information jungle: foraging, hunting, and retracing. (1) Foraging is the proces of keeping up to date with recent information, making sure that we are aware of relevant original research that could improve patient-oriented issues Hunting is the process of asking and answering questions at the point of care. Research has shown that the typical primary care physician has 10 or 15 clinical questions by means of day of outpatient care if it be not that attempts to answer only a fraction of these questions, and then not always with the best available evidence. Retracing is the proces of systematically reviewing our knowledge of used by all or important diseases and symptoms above time.

In this issue of AFP, we are introducing any new features that help orbicular out our ability to suited all of your information needs: foraging, hunting, and retracing. "Tips from Other Journals" have always been a great way to withhold up to date with recently made known research, and we recently added "POEMs" (Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters) to supply that feature. (2) POEMs are fix uponed from a monthly survey of more than 100 clinical research journals and set forth research that addresses a customary or important primary care question, measures patient-oriented issues and has the potential to change your practice. Each metrical composition takes the form of a structur summary that helps you determine if the research is of interest, if it is relevant to your practice, if it is valid and well designed, and what the bottom line is for patient care. Dr Shaughnessy also is coordinating and editing the novel "STEPS" (Safety, Tolerability, Efficacy, Price, Simplicity) feature that gives you a quick, evidence-based, independent overview of a recently made known drug each month. (3)

To help you answer questions that arise during the care of patients, we have added selected passages from the Family Practice Inquiries Network's (FPIN) "Clinical Inquiries" feature. Each month FPIN (www.fpin.org) identifies questions that arise in family practice and provides answers using the best available evidence. (4) The "Cochrane for Clinicians" feature is expanding to include the same long and two concise summaries of recent reviews from this world-class source of evidence-based information. Each piece answers an important clinical question about treatment. "Point-of-Care Guides" is a modern feature that provides practical tools to help you apply evidence in practice. Where appropriate, the Guides include an affair form to help you build this approach into your care of patients. We will make these available in a format that you can download, thus you can modify or adapt them as needed

Finally, we will continue to give you highly readable and authoritative review articles to help you with the task of retracing: reviewing your knowledge about a public or important condition. Our editors will continue working with authors to make secure that their recommendations are based upon the best and most new evidence. To make it easier for you to find tonic recommendations, each article will eventually include a summary table, the relations on which they are based, and the puissance of evidence that underlies that recommendation. The evidence will be rated A, B or C using the modern Strength of Recommendation Taxonomy (SORT) expanded by editors of family medicine journals. (5)

We will strive to maintain the same clearly written and well-illustrated format that you have proceed to expect from AFP. according to adding these new features and building in succession our existing strengths, we will make confident that AFP remains the best place to adapted all of your information needs

REFERENCES

(1) Shaughnessy AF, Slawson DC Bennett JH Becoming an information master: a guidebook to the medical information brake J Fam Pract 1994;39:489-99.

(2) Shaughnessy AF, Siwek J Introducing metrical compositions [Editorial]. Am Fam Physician 2003;67:11961199